Color is another aspect that has upended the natural diamond market. Colorless natural diamonds were worth more unless the color was intense which was rarer. Pink diamonds were the rarest and most expensive. Diamonds with just hints of color were worth less. Lab grown diamonds are able to replicate color reliably and one main clue that a diamond might be lab grown is if the color is too intense. If the diamond was natural, most people could not afford it.

The point is the salesman made her diamond's flaws as a selling point. Natural diamonds with flaws are cheaper as perfect, flawless diamonds are rarer. However synthetic diamonds have fewer flaws as the process can be tightly controlled. In order to keep selling natural diamonds, they have to push the narrative that flaws make natural diamonds more attractive somehow.

Isn’t Enterprise Windows a subscription model with a minimum number of seats ? That's a hard no if it is.

I heard that pitch one time from a bride: "My diamond had this small distinguishable crack so it can be identified later if it got stolen." I did not say what I thought. "My new car has an identifiable scratch so it can be recovered later if it gets stolen."

Also being cheaper, it is gets lost or stolen, it is easier to replace especially since nearly identical diamond can be ordered again.

And which girls think it is cool that someone dug up a rock in a mine? Most of them care how diamonds look. Between lab grown and natural, there is no difference in that regard. Without lab equipment it is hard for any person just to look at a diamond and tell where it originated. The value of the diamond is currently about bragging rights; but that price is artificially controlled by DeBeers.

Diamonds are not as rare as the industry would like the public to believe. Cartels like DeBeers control the supply. For the purposes of jewelry, synthetic ones have less variability which makes them more attractive for manufacturing. The main drawback is the stigma. If the public sentiment shifts to not caring, then DeBeers will face a decline.

Yep. Thus helping the blue states to maintain their dominance in technology work.

Yeah. I'd expect journalists to know basic grammar and not use present tense when talking about last year.

It might make more sense to use the hydrogen to produce methane, which is considerably easier to store and manage.

Ah... there's the problem. In your initial post you said $2500 per month. It's no surprise people were freaking out about that. $208 per month is significant, but $2500 a month would be crazy.

While desalination is a great use of excess power, this is not an easy thing to do because the places where the water is needed are inland. Obviously it doesn't make sense to pump desalinated water 180 miles uphill from the Gulf of California to Phoenix, what you really want to do is to use desalinated water at the places nearer the coast so they can stop relying on the river water that comes from the mountain west, so the southwest can use more of it (and so the mountain west can keep more of it for our own use). But while you could get some benefit from getting the coastal cities using desalinated water, their use actually isn't that significant. The bulk of the water goes to California farmlands, and those are in a belt 70-100 miles from the coasts, and there are mountains in between. Not terribly tall ones, but enough to make pumping the water challenging.

None of this means what you say isn't a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be built to make it work. Big coastal desalination plants, big pipelines from those plants, fed by big pumps, and either additional reservoirs or perhaps large tanks in the mountains to buffer the water supply -- though only after peak supply rises to the point that it exceeds demand. Heh. That's exactly the same situation as with intermittent, renewable power, just shifted to water. Water is a lot easier to store, of course, but you still have to build the infrastructure to store it.

So, this is a good idea, but it's an idea that will take years, probably a decade, to realize... and we have excess power now. Of course, starting by tackling the easier problem of using desalinated water in the coastal cities while the infrastructure is built out and scaled up makes sense.

Yep. This, like many problems associated with regulated utilities, is one where the right answer is also pretty simple: Just make the prices reflect the costs, then let the market sort it out. But the "just" in that statement belies the political challenges of making such changes.

You assume. You should consider that people with an inside view who see what data is actually collected, how it's secured and managed and how it's used, may have a very different perspective on that. I mean, without an internal view you understandably have to assume the worst, but they (we) don't.

Speaking for myself, I very few concerns about Google's privacy violations today. But with respect to the future, you and I are in the same boat, neither of us can know what a future version of the company might do. And on that score I suspect you and I would find ourselves in strong agreement on the potential for serious harm. Where we might differ again is that I see the work being done to limit Google's access to user data so I'm cautiously optimistic that before all vestiges of the old corporate culture are lost and the bean counters take over completely, Google will largely have ceased collecting and using data for advertising and what remains will be easy to limit and make safe.

Re: your subject "Not true", the data doesn't lie. The fact that you're an outlier doesn't change the situation.

Me too, though usually it's audiobooks for fiction and certain types of non-fiction. Being able to "read" a book while mowing the lawn, or whatever, has made chores far less annoying and opened up big blocks of time for reading.